ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a twentieth-century echo of an eighteenth-century conundrum. William Ivey, past chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gave a keynote speech in 1999 at the Chicago Center for Arts Policy. In 1787, Colman Jr.'s play Inkle and Yarico was first produced at the Haymarket Theatre. Eighteenth-century racial theory would suggest that the Amerindian being closer to the European ethnically, interracial sex between European and Amerindian, or a lighter-skinned other was more acceptable than sex between European and African or black Caribs. The colors of Yarico thus spread across discourses of race and politics as well as of aesthetics and domesticity. Colman the younger inherited his family's skepticism about motley collectors. Colman's strong preference for living and pleasing artifacts over merely old or merely new things also fits nicely into the contemporary debate over antiquarianism and connoisseurship.
